Study: Income Levels Affect Kids’ IQ, Behavior
By SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 5/31/2007 6:00:00 AM
Children from low-income families don’t perform as well on IQ and achievement tests and have more behavioral problems than children from middle- and higher-income families, says a new study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The kids, however, don’t differ when it comes to other basic cognitive functions like memory and verbal fluency, or when it comes to social skills.
The study, which appears in the May issue of the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, summarizes the results of psychological tests conducted on 500 American kids from birth to 18 and measures a broad spectrum of abilities, from fine motor control and social skills to aspects of intelligence, such as the ability to explain verbal concepts or solve visual puzzles. Contrary to popular belief, although there are hints of differences in verbal and spatial abilities between boys and girls, they’re not as sharp as those described in previous reports, the study says. “In fact, there were no sex differences in verbal fluency [and] there were also no differences in calculation ability, suggesting that boys and girls have an equal aptitude for math,” the study adds. Regardless of income or sex, however, the study shows that when it comes to basic cognitive and motor skills, children approach adult levels of performance on both fronts by the age of 11 or 12. Kids appear to improve rapidly on many tasks between ages six and 10, with much less dramatic cognitive growth in adolescence, the report continues. This finding is in line with previous research suggesting that in adolescence, there’s a shift toward integrating what one knows, rather than learning new basic skills, says Deborah Waber, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of psychiatry at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. The study “will provide researchers with a reference point for how the normal brain develops, so that they can better understand what goes wrong in children who have brain abnormalities caused by genetic disease, prenatal exposure to alcohol or drugs, or other factors,” says Waber.
